I’ve been working on a module for submission to the Vault since the end of May. After two more hours of work this morning, the toolset crapped out as I was saving the module. Now I cannot open the module in the toolset at all and get the attached error message when I try to open it in the actual game!
Someone PLEASE tell me there is a known fix or work around for this problem!! If almost 5 months of work goes down the crapper, I’m gonna go postal on my laptop!
Thanks,
Dave
angry_yard_gnome
Hold on, before everything is lost, how was the module saved, as a single file or as a folder?
It was saved as a single file in the NWN2 mods folder in Documents.
mmmm this is going to be more problematic, I’m afraid.
Any chance you could send me the file?
I always save modules as folders in NWN2, since they’re usually easier to recover when shaeningans like this happen.
In all honesty, I don’t think anything can be done, but perhaps I manage to extract some of the resouces from it on the toolset (or via the NWNpacker) and salvage something, it might be worth a try, although I would not have great expectations if I were in your place.
I don’t suppose you make backups or keep copies?
You could try using Tanita’s NWN2Packer tool and see if you can open the module file. That should show the same files as you get in a module folder.
Post a link to the module as it exists so that people can look at it.
I hope you manage to solve this thing, angry_yard_gnome! I feel your pain. 
As others have already stated, if you manage to get your module working again, going forward, always save your module as a directory, and make backups regularly. I think I have at least 50 backups on the module I’m working on at the moment. A lot of bad and strange things can happen in the buggy NWN2 toolset and game, I’m sorry to say, so one should always be very careful and make copies. You never know what can happen. It has saved me more than a few times.
One thing that is also really neat with directories is that you can add and remove files very easily, and you have a much better overview of things.
As rjshae stated, the NWN2Packer is a really good tool. I hope you can manage to load your module into that and then export the files into a directory instead, and from there maybe you could remove files and make it work again.
Thank to all for the suggestions. I’m over my initial psychotic outburst. I had some real work to get done last night and had to come into the office early today, but will post a copy of the mod on the Vault tonight and post the link here as well.
I’ll give NWN2Packer tool a shot tonight. I knew the toolset was buggy, it would randomly shut down about once a session when I was working in it. But I was totally unaware that it would actually damage a mod under construction to the point of making it unusable! Lesson learned. I’ll try to salvage what I can, hopefully I won’t have to rebuild the whole thing. We’ll see.
Thanks again for all the help.
All,
I just posted the file to the Vault here:
https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/module/hermits-chalice-corrupted
If you have the time, please take a look and let me know if it’s even possible to save it.
Thanks
I took a look at your module. It’s only 50,345,565 bytes, your module should be 483,084,368 bytes. I can extract the ~ 10% if you want it but I understand if that’s a lost cause.
The header of the erf stores the information about each file and how many bytes it contains.
Are you sure there’s no other backups anywhere? Is there no temp directory perhaps? (I don’t know NWN2 as well as NWN1)
good point. If the last module you loaded in Nwn2 is your module its data should still be in your Temp directory
so don’t play Nwn2 until you’ve scrounged that out …
eg
C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Temp\NWN2
but i guess that’s probly a bit late
I was able to salvage some of the areas and a few scripts. Everything else has fallen to the abyss, unfortunately.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/uy8xje7ru4wqlz5/The%20Hermit's%20Chalice.7z?dl=0
@angry_yard_gnome Did you make a save when playtesting? do you still have it?
All, thank you very much for your efforts at saving the mod! @orth, thanks for the info about the headers… what do I look for in the files to find that type of info out? Please excuse my ignorance, I’m the one missing from the local village when it comes to this stuff!
@orth & @kevL_s, thanks for the suggestion. I haven’t played since it died on me. When I get home tonight, I’ll take a look, thanks for the path.
@travus, THANK YOU! I’ll download them on my PC tonight. Any little bit will help.
@kevL_s, unfortunately the only saves I made were in the toolset.
This corruption of the mod by the toolset took me completely off guard. Never expected to loose more than a few hours work when it would randomly crap out on me. SERIOUS lesson learned! I’ll be backing up to multiple locations from here on out.
I owe the community a collective first round on me!
Thanks again.
I’m afraid the tools I use are probably beyond the novice user, but perhaps I’m wrong! I use, among other things, the NWN Perl Tools available from here http://www.kivinen.iki.fi/nwn/index.html.
By running an erfunpack.pl -n -v -v -v command I got this information which tells me all about what SHOULD be in the module, but alas not what is in the corrupted mod: https://gist.github.com/plenarius/0665d763363d90f1aa436b02da359ef4
Bad luck that. I’ve been there; it’s no fun losing several months work. On the positive side, you know what you did the first time, so you can usually put it together more quickly, along with adding potential improvements.
Are you using the NWN2 Client Extension? If so, try reverting to a previous version.
@orth LOL! Yeah, way beyond my skillset! But thanks anyway! I really appreciate the help.
@controlshift Thanks for the suggestion, but since I’m not even sure what the Client Extension is, I doubt I’m using it!
I checked everywhere I could for a Temp file with the mod still in it, no joy.
Looks like it’s gonna be a total rebuild…
@rjshae, thanks. Yeah, you’re right… the rebuild is coming along faster that the initial build did. I’ve already got four of the fourteen areas re-built. Unfortunately, most of the remaining areas are large outdoor areas… I tend to get wrapped up in the details when building areas like that. Hopefully by the holiday season I’ll have it ready to test and post shortly after that.
